About

CalArts is the better-known name for the California Institute of the Arts, an arts school in Valencia, California. The school has produced animators of many popular television shows. In the late 2010s, it became somewhat-notorious for teaching a signature animation style which can be found in popular television shows including Adventure Time, Steven Universe, and Gravity Falls. This has led to backlash from animation fans, as some have criticized the style for being lazy and saturating popular culture.

History

The California Institute of the Arts was founded in 1961^[1] by a number of benefactors including Nelbert Murphy Chouinard, Walt Disney, Lulu Von Hagen, Thornton Ladd, and others. As of Fall 2016, the school has roughly 1,447 students and an acceptance rate of roughly 28%.

Notable Alumni

CalArts alumni include many popular actors and musicians including Dustin Hoffman, Alison Brie, David Hasselhoff, and many more.^[2] Famous animators and directors to have graduated CalArts include Butch Hartman (Fairly Oddparents, Danny Phantom), Stephen Hillenburg (Spongebob Squarepants), and Kevin Lima (A Goofy Movie, Tarzan). Several Pixar animators have graduated from CalArts including Pete Docter, lead animator Monsters Inc, Up, and Inside Out. The "Pixar University" run at Pixar is said to be based on the methods taught at CalArts.

Backlash

Backlash to CalArts began spreading after the success of Adventure Time, when many popular television shows like Steven Universe, The Amazing World of Gumball, Gravity Falls, and more featured characters with similar faces featuring a bean-like and an ovular mouth (comparison image shown below). It has also been called the "Thin-line style."^[3]

On social media, artists have animation fans have had polarizing opinions regarding the so-called "CalArts Style." A popular Tumblr post showing CalArts characters (and Sans from Undertale, though he is not a CalArts character) spread in 2016, gaining over 12,000 notes (shown below, left). User Ceeberoni showed silhouettes of CalArts characters (and Sans again), saying that because one could identify the characters from their silhouettes, it was good design (shown below, right).

The "Cal Arts Style" was coined in 2010 by blogger John K discussing various animation similarities between Disney films in different eras as it related to The Iron Giant.^[6]

RCDart

RCDart is the artist name of Rory Cummings-Dise, an agender fan artist that had been posting on social media since at least July 2012 (example from November 2014 shown below, left). In March of 2016, they announced that they had been accepted into art school Cal Arts, which is notable as many found that their art grew significantly worse after attending the art school. Additionally, Cummings-Dise drew the ire of Tumblr users for their depictions of fictional characters twice, in March 2016 and January 2018, through respectively their depictions of Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, and Finn from the 2010s Star Wars (shown below, middle and right). The former was seen as trans-fetishistic, while the latter was accused of being racist.

#CalArts Style

After the release of the trailer for Thundercats Roar in May 2018, a reboot of the Thundercats cartoon, social media users heavily of criticized it for employing the "CalArts Style." Twitter and other social media users mocked the reboot by imagining other shows being rebooted with the art style. For example, Twitter user @flipskip1 parodied the recently popular Captain America Detention meme by drawing Captain America in the style, gaining over 8,700 retweets and 35,000 likes (shown below, left). Twitter user @speedosausage tweeted a parody of The Simpsons drawn in the style, gaining over 1,700 retweets and 9,000 likes (shown below, right).

Campus Closing

On June 3, 2018, the now-deleted Twitter account @ScrumpAdmin posted an image of a shooting target with a CalArts-style face drawn on it with a caption referencing the Some Of You Guys Are Alright meme. In response to this, on June 4, CalArts announced that the campus would be closed to protect students.^[4] A tweet by Twitter user @isawiitchtalk about the situation gained over 800 retweets and over 2,800 likes.^[5]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References